


don't bring tomorrow

by soldierwitch



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, POV Bellamy Blake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 08:05:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6230659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soldierwitch/pseuds/soldierwitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Clarke is in Polis. She's not coming back.</i> Bellamy hates that he must repeat the thought like a mantra, but it is the only way to live with the reality of her absence. This waking dream, with its anxiety and cautious eyes, is no more her than the swing of blonde hair disappearing behind a corner or the sound of her voice in his ear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't bring tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Canon compliant up to 3x03. Unbeta’d. Title from [Tomorrow - Daughter.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqxJ5oC7s1E)
> 
>   
>  _I feel these limbs are growing cold to numb_  
>  Take a good look at what I've become  
> There's a hole in my chest  
> And I don't think it's leaving room for anyone 
> 
> _There's a burning love for me at rest_  
>  Yeah pounding at the walls of my flesh  
> I'm trying my best  
> Just to let it set before I come undone 
> 
> _[Waking Up - PVRIS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23rmHpgDI94)   
>  _   
> 

The fires are warm outside. The jokes loud; the anger louder. Pike stands before the barreled flames with a drink in hand giving a toast to the fallen. He has done this every night for two weeks.

Bellamy flicks his eyes across the gathered crowd. They hum with a tension only survivors know. He downs his drink, ignores the laughter in his ears; the gentle press of a kiss against his cheek. Gena is gone. All that's left is phantom pain and memories.

The walk to his quarters is lonely despite the nods of deference he receives from fellow guards and delinquents alike. They mean well with their sad eyes and half smiles, but he wishes they'd just pretend he wasn't there. _I am a ghost_ , he thinks. _A shade of my former self. Can’t they see?_

He steps into his room--head down and shoulders slumped--forgoes turning on the light. Tonight the dark suits him better. Gena was a reprieve from the shadows, from missing and wondering and aching. Without her he is back where he started with the exception of more grief and guilt weighing on his conscience. Sighing, he sheds his guardsmen’s jacket, unlaces his boots, and drops heavily onto his bed, head in his hands.

“Bellamy.”

His eyes snap to the far corner of his room just as Clarke steps into the small slither of moonlight streaming through the blinds. He lets his eyes take stock of her. There are no visible signs of injury. She's simply dressed--a long sleeve shirt, pants, boots--and clean faced. Fatigue bends the line of her back, but it's anxiousness that has her wringing her hands and biting her lip as she stares back at him. 

She says, “Hey,” and he is reminded of mornings spent desperately trying to forget the lies his dreams would spin for him. 

_Clarke is in Polis. She's not coming back._ Bellamy hates that he must repeat the thought like a mantra, but it is the only way to live with the reality of her absence. This waking dream, with its anxiety and cautious eyes, is no more her than the swing of blonde hair disappearing behind a corner or the sound of her voice in his ear. 

“What do you want?” Bellamy asks because it’s the only question that matters. If he's going to indulge this hallucination then he wants an answer. 

“Nothing,” she says.

He can hear the lie in the word ringing clear and false in the air. “You want something,” he says shucking his shirt. “You wouldn't be here if you didn't.”

“Just to see you.”

Bellamy ignores the flutter of his heart and her words. _This isn’t real_ , he reminds himself. “You see me in my dreams,” he says walking toward her and stopping right before his boot meets hers. “Must you haunt my nights, too?”

She doesn’t respond, so he continues hoping that if he says the words he needs to say then she'll leave him alone. “Thinking of you,” he begins. “ _Wishing_ for you is a mistake I can’t make anymore.”

The pain that blossoms in her eyes calls him to comfort her, but this Clarke isn’t real. _His_ Clarke is playing the role of Wanheda, using death as a shroud to hide behind. She is practicing cowardice while still acting the king in Polis. His Clarke is lost to him. The pain of this one should be of no consequence...and yet.

Bellamy turns his back willing the vision to disappear, to fade into the darkness from which it came. _You are alone, and you will remain alone._

Suddenly, he feels her arms sliding around his waist as her cheek presses against his shoulder. She whispers his name like a prayer and holds to him like an anchor.

His arms stay by his side as he fights the urge to give in to this illusion. “You’re not here,” he says.

“I am.”

He shakes his head. “You’re guilt and you’re pain, but you aren’t Clarke.”

“I am.”

“This is a dream.”

“Bellamy,” she says as she clings tighter to him.

“Clarke is in Polis,” he says removing her hands from around him and turning to face her. “She abandoned her people. She’s not coming home.”

Tears spring to her eyes, but Clarke doesn’t say anything. 

Bellamy looks to the side, averting his gaze, so he doesn’t have to say, “I need to accept that her choice wasn’t us,” to this ghost’s face. Even as an apparition, Clarke has the power to make him ache with the knowledge of wounding her as if every injury is one struck against himself.

When she grabs his hand and places it over her heart, he returns his gaze to her, eyes wide and breath stolen.

“I left for me,” Clarke begins, swallowing hard. 

“You stayed for you, too,” he says and for a moment he lets the bitterness run through him, lets it intoxicate him enough to admit the rapid thump thump thump of her heart is real. That this _is_ Clarke standing before him with tears welling in her eyes as if they’ve switched places and _he’s_ the one who refuses to come home, who won’t--He pulls his hand from her grasp. “Why are you here?”

“I told you.”

He shakes his head. “The real reason, Clarke,” he says. 

“You,” she insists, reaching a hand out for him.

He steps back. “I don’t believe you.”

Her hand falls to her side. “Bellamy.”

“Why are you here, Clarke?” He looks away from her, crossing his arms.

“To see you.” 

“No, you aren’t.”

“Why won’t you--”

“Because you had three months to see me,” he yells, finally turning back to her.

She stands wide-eyed.

Bellamy yanks on the leash of his pain, forcing it back down and sealing it away. That raw emotion has no place here. He’d split his skin over it, punching trees and scraping his knuckles against the bark. Screamed into his pillow like a child. Whimpered into the folds of his sheets. Clarke doesn’t need to know the extent of the damage she left in her wake; she doesn’t deserve to. “You had three months,” he says softly. “So, why are you here now?”

“Because you turned your back on me,” Clarke says helplessly. 

He sneers. “You turned yours first.”

“You gave up on me,” she whispers it like the words are something she’s still processing, still trying to wrap her mind around. 

Bellamy resists the urge to rub a hand over his heart. His chest hurts. Burns. He curls his fingers into fists by his side. “I risked my life for you,” he says with grit dirtying his words with anger. “I didn’t give up on you, Clarke. You gave up on _us_.” 

“I stayed to keep the peace. Because I needed to--”

“Why is it always about what you need? Why don’t you ever think about--”

“I do think about you,” Clarke yells. She furiously wipes tears from her face. “I think about you even when I don’t want to. “ She points to her head. “You’re in here. And…,” she places her hand over her heart. “You were all I thought about when I let that bomb--”

“No, that’s not on me,” he says fiercely. “Don’t you put that on me.”

“They were going to find you. If I stopped the bomb, they would have known you were there, and I just kept thinking about losing you.”

_I can’t lose you, too_ , whispers like a tease through his memory greying his vision and wiping away the red haze of disappointment and pain. The black and white of loss and fear remain stark and uncomfortable before him as she cries.

“So, you let a bomb drop with my sister in its path,” he says wiping a hand across his mouth not in disbelief, but in understanding which he wishes did not exist. _Will I forgive her anything_ , he asks himself though he steers clear of the answer. Down that path lies ruin and he has already been made a broken, fractured thing at her hands. 

“Her and hundreds of people. Some of them children.” 

“If she’d died, you would have lost me anyway,” he says because he needs to make that clear. 

“I know.”

“And it didn’t stop you.”

“No,” she says. 

He hears _at least you would have been alive_ even though she doesn’t say it aloud.

Clarke spreads her arms. “I have become Death. Destroyer of worlds.”

“Wanheda.”

She flinches. “Don’t call me that.”

“Isn’t that who you are now?” He says spitefully to cover his softening edges.

“Not to you.” 

Bellamy hears the question in her words though she says it like a statement. Her eyes give her away, and he wants to argue, to dispute her words, but he can’t. She’s _Clarke_...she’s...she just _is_. 

“No, not to me,” he admits.

Clarke walks over to him, steps timid and unsure as her hands reach up to take hold of his cheeks. She presses her forehead to his.

“You’re going to leave again,” he whispers, hands staying at his sides.

“I have to go back.”

_Are you ever going to come home?_ Bellamy wonders, but doesn’t say because he’s determined to be strong without her. _She left_ , repeats through his head, but his heart’s urgent, _but she came back_ , is winning out.

When Clarke says, “I’m sorry,” he gives in with a broken sound, hands enveloping her in an embrace, pressing her body into his as best he can. 

“I’m sorry,” she repeats and he clutches her, fingers digging into her waist.

Bellamy whispers her name, lets his hands travel over the expansion of her back, scaling up until they tangle into her mess of blonde hair. 

Clarke kisses him. A desperate press of her lips against his.

His surprise melts away at the soft scratch of her nails against his nape. He slows the kiss down.

She pulls back with a whimper. “I can’t lose you,” she whispers.

“I’m not lost.”

“But you’re pulling away.”

They are fit together, clothes rubbing and pushing up with their closeness, but there is a wall and he knows she can feel it.

“Clarke,” he says with a sigh. _Don’t_ , he pleads with every line of his body. _Please_.

She nods. “Okay,” she says looking away for a moment before returning her eyes to his. “Okay,” Clarke says again. “But just let me…” She presses a kiss to his cheek. “Please.” Kisses his lips. “Let me.” Kisses his neck. Her hands slide down his chest. She dips to kiss his heart. 

Bellamy pulls her into a searing kiss, lifting her up, and walking her to the table across the room. He knows that come morning this will have settled into a mistake that he will regret. Clarke is not coming home. She has made him no promises of return, but right now she is here. She has supposedly come back to see him, and he has missed her with an ache that runs deep and cold. Even now as he pulls her shirt over her head and presses soft kisses to her breasts he misses her. Bellamy has missed Clarke from the moment she kissed his cheek and walked away. Nothing has changed that. No matter how far he buried himself in his duties to his people, and in the love of a good woman, he has missed her. 

Clarke keeps finding her way back to his heart. Soft touches, sweet kisses. She moans against it as his fingers deftly gain entry to her pants. Hers clumsily fiddle with his buckle. He thinks the old him would have laughed at her, braced for the light smack of her hand against his side for the tease of _Brave princess bested by a buckle_ falling from his lips. But Bellamy is no longer that person and Clarke is no longer the girl he used to know. This Clarke bites with sharp teeth and soothes with a sharper tongue. She forgets trying to get the belt off, settles for loosening it so that she can push his pants and underwear down and grab hold of him. 

He chokes back a groan.

“I missed--”

Bellamy cuts her off by capturing her mouth with his. He pulls her pants down as she strokes him soft and slow, thumb rubbing across his tip.

Clarke breaks the kiss and watches him moan as she moves her hand faster.

He leans his head against her shoulder; she buries her fingers in his hair, leans close to his ear. 

“You are what gets me through,” she says guiding him into her. “Ah--” Her back arches as he pushes all the way in. She moans his name.

Bellamy holds her as she trembles, trying to adjust. Like their first kiss, Clarke is the first to move. Her hips coax him into a rhythm. Through gasps and whimpers, she speaks to him of nights spent sleepless due to thoughts of him and home. 

Clarke keens and whispers, “I shouldn’t have left.”

He licks her neck and nips at her shoulder. Busies his hands with the texture of her breasts and the roll of her nipples beneath his thumbs. 

She snatches his head back, her hand buried in his curls. “Bellamy, I…” her bottom lip quivers as she struggles not to close her eyes in pleasure. “I…”

Bellamy shushes her. “I’m not lost,” he says.

“Neither am I.”

He bites her lip.

“I want to believe you.”

“Then believe me,” she says.

Bellamy fucks into Clarke hard, desperate with the feel of her and her words.

The whisper of “I need you” in his ear sends him over. He pulls her with him, a groaned “Need you” escapes him before he can catch it.

She cries out his name as she shakes and shivers with release. Nothing has ever felt as good to him as his name in her mouth.

When their breathing settles, she takes his hand. Doesn’t say anything just looks.

He doesn’t know what to do other than look back.

Whatever she finds makes her smile. It is small, but there in the curve of her lips. He finds himself smiling back. Small, but true. A tiny piece of good between them that he lets push his worries and fears away. 

They undress--wordlessly removing boots and socks, shimmying out of pants and underclothes--and climb into bed wrapped around one another. 

Bellamy knows that Clarke will be gone before morning lights this dark world of theirs but tonight she is writing words across his heart with her finger. Words that suspiciously feel like home and life and love. Ones he’s not ready to face, but willing to feel no matter how much they will hurt when she leaves for Polis, a world that does not include him. Tonight at least is theirs and he will hold her for as long as he can before sleep claims him and tomorrow washes this all away.

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> This was cathartic for me. I feel much better now. Thank you for reading.


End file.
